


Reflections, or A Woman Puts On Her Face

by LastAmericanMermaid



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, ClinTasha if you squint, F/M, Freeform, Gen, I'm Sorry, Introspection, Makeup, Natasha Feels, Natasha-centric, One Shot, author tried to make cosmetics into a deep thing, detailed description of makeup application, for like one second, ideas about beauty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:44:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4826156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LastAmericanMermaid/pseuds/LastAmericanMermaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alias Black Widow wears many faces. They are never her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflections, or A Woman Puts On Her Face

**Author's Note:**

> I had an idea while I was putting my makeup on today for a little character study piece involving Natasha putting makeup on. She always looks so flawless, I thought it would be interesting to imagine her thought process when applying that perfect face. Makeup as a shield rather than a weapon. 
> 
> Also, I love Natasha and I wanted to get my feet wet writing her as the main character for something I'm brainstorming. 
> 
> Love you all.

She wakes up looking like a ghost.

 

The face she sees in the mirror, after she’s had her morning piss and wiped the sleep from her eyes, aggressively brushed her teeth, it doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to.

She looks too young. It is irritating.

The skin is a little paler, a little more freckled, the shapely eyebrows fairer and less defined. The plump lips, normally lined and lipsticked, are naked, and vaguely chapped. The bridge of the nose is so clean it shines under the bathroom light.

She stands a few moments longer, blearily staring at the tired-eyed young woman in the mirror, trying to intimidate her away.

It doesn’t work; it never does. Not without reinforcements, anyway.

Pulling her hair up into a ponytail, she gets to work.

 

First: expensive toner that smells faintly of wine grapes and the French countryside, poured carefully onto a single cotton pad.

Swipe, swipe. Across the brow, along the cheekbones.

Next: out comes the plain black pouch, zippered shut and straining with the sheer volume of its contents. The pouch is unzipped, and three initial items are removed. A tube of tinted cream, a small screw-top pot with a tasteful logo on the lid, and a delicate angle-tipped brush.

The tube is uncapped and a small quantity of cream is squeezed out onto the back of her hand, between her thumb and forefinger. She begins dabbing the cream in spots and lines across her face—three dots for her forehead, a swipe below each eye and down her nose, two dots for each cheek, a dot on the chin—before blending and patting it with the same calm precision she has used to type infinite streams of code to hack into government encrypted mainframes.

When the cream has been blended and smoothed and no freckle dares show itself on the golden-ivory plain of her face, she unscrews the lid of the pot, picks up the angled brush. Leans forward, closer to the mirror.

With a few delicate strokes, quick and deadly accurate as a silent kill shot, the arches of her brows are darkened, the tails tapering perfectly.

She allows herself a small half-smile at the unfinished work reflected in the mirror.

 

(Sometimes, people she has slept with have told her she is beautiful without makeup. Sometimes, she believes them. Sometimes, she has told them, in her voice like smoke and snow and honey, to fuck off. The man she sleeps with now doesn’t say anything, knows better. He loves her with a black eye and a split lip, with bare baby skin or full-vamp makeup. He doesn’t love her for her face, and she loves him fiercely for that.)

 

When the tube and brush and screw-top pot are replaced in the zippered pouch, three more items are retrieved.

Another screw-top container, a bit larger, holding a springy cake of powder-cream the dusty russet of autumn leaves. A small purple tube that reminds her inexplicably of the bottle in _I Dream of Jeannie_. A large, rectangular metal palette meant to look like rose-gold.

 

(Sometimes she hates what is expected of her, the name she has made for herself just by being a woman and using it to her advantage. Some days, she’d rather show up to work with a bare face, dare anyone to say anything. She hates that it’s her as an object, a pretty thing, that gets her in where she needs to be more often than not.)

 

 

The small purple tube gets meticulously uncapped, and the nude-colored paste it extrudes is carefully patted over her eyelids with her ring finger. It blurs and conceals the teeny little bluish-green veins that ghost over the thin skin of her lids.

(She is on her way to becoming a separate creature, adding more distance between herself and the fragile, human girl who greeted her in the mirror.)

Then, the rusty-rose powder-cream is dabbed gingerly along cheekbones, over the apples of the cheeks as well. She notes, snorting, that there is a lot of dabbing involved in this process.

The metal palette gets opened next, and the double-ended brush tucked inside is utilized to sweep shimmering rosy-brown across her and matte taupe into the creases of her eyelids, smudged under the lower lash line. A quick touch of the pad of her pinky finger to the inside corners of her eyes with the palest, whitest-gold shimmer in the palette, and she is finished.

The golden-ivory of her face has gained a fetching flush, and her heavy-lidded eyes are huge, and strikingly green.

 

(When she was young, she had been taught to kill without hesitation, cleanly and efficiently. Most girls experiment with lipsticks and eyeshadows when they’re teenagers. They figure out what they like, what makes them feel confident and beautiful and bright. Whether they like it at all. She didn’t learn how to put on makeup until she was twenty-two years old, and when she did, it was so she could get closer to her marks. Now, working for the so-called good guys, she wears it out of habit. Maybe as extra insurance.)

 

 

Back into the bag for the blush, the primer, the eyeshadow. Out come the two black cylinders, one tall, one short with a domed cap.

The first is the black she brushes deftly onto her thick lashes, making them impossibly, hopelessly long and dark.

The shorter black cylinder is uncapped and the base twisted to reveal a deep, winter red. Burgundy. Wine, but less purple. More like drying—not dried—blood, dark and cold and perfectly matte.

Before touching pointed tip to pale lip, she makes a face; she has forgotten to line her lips. Grumbling, she rummages in her zippered pouch for the thin black-cased pencil, making a small noise of triumph when she pulls her hand from the belly of the bag, pencil clutched tightly.

Swipe, swipe, curved line, curved line. Done.

 _Now_ the bloody winter red can be uncapped again and pressed to the pale pink of her plump lip, painted across so that all the pink is gone.

All that’s left now is the dusting of powder on fluffy brush—used by prima ballerinas, translucent and microfine—to set the masterpiece and hold it in place for however long it is needed.

When all the contents of the pouch are zipped back in tight, stowed in the cabinet below the sink, when the hair tie is pulled and the dyed-red curtains of her hair let down, she looks in the mirror and smiles.

 

From her bedroom across the hall, her lover calls groggily, “Tasha? Come back to bed, it’s our day off.”

She points at the statuesque, stunning, mesmerizing goddess reflected back and speaks, but she’s speaking to the sleepy-eyed kid from ten minutes ago.

“You never stood a chance, kid.”

 

She smiles again, a small, private smile, before padding in bare feet back down the hall to bed.


End file.
